Acquiring QQVGA images with the YCbCr422 color format
When compiling the previous sketch for the Arduino Nano, you may have noticed the following warning message in the IDE’s output log: Low memory available, stability may occur. This warning message appears because the QVGA image in the RGB565 color format requires a buffer of 153.6 KB, equivalent to roughly 60% of the available SRAM in the microcontroller.
In this recipe, we will show how to acquire an image at a lower resolution and use the YCbCr422 color format to reduce memory requirements, without compromising image quality.
Getting ready
Images are well known to require big chunks of memory, which might be a problem when dealing with microcontrollers.
Lowering the image resolution is a common practice to reduce the image memory size. Common image resolutions for microcontrollers are smaller than the QVGA (320x240) previously used, such as QQVGA (160x120) or QQQVGA (80x60...